Put the police back on beat

IT seems to represent everything one fears about Whitehall's management of the police. The revelation that the recruitment of civilian staff has outstripped that of uniformed officers sums up much of what went wrong with Labour's attitude to crime: billions of pounds spent but too much bureaucracy and too few policemen and women on the streets.

Now the new Government has to do something about it. When there is such a huge pressure on Ministers to make savings, they must look again at whether this many civilian staff are necessary and whether they are truly value for money.

This is particularly relevant in Yorkshire, where the ratio of civilians to uniformed officers soared between 2000 and 2009 at the region's four forces. In Humberside, officers are deeply divided over a six year plan, now half-way through, which will see 311 officer posts replaced by 379 civilian staff. In two other areas, the situation is even worse, with the number of other staff actually exceeding the number of policemen and women at Northamptonshire and Surrey. The concerns over this are immediately apparent. Police Federation representatives are worried it means a watering down of the service, that the impact of civilian staff has never been properly tested, that such individuals have not had proper training for the work, much of it sensitive, which they carry out and that public safety could be compromised.

Chief Constable Peter Fahy, the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, defends the system as being able to take away the administrative burden facing officers. There is an even better way to do this, however, by getting Ministers to cut the mountain of paperwork which has become the bane of everyone from constables on the beat to custody sergeants and detectives trying to catch dangerous individuals.

Nick Herbert, the new Police Minister, must make this a priority and get bobbies back on the beat. More than a decade of Labour tinkering has left ordinary constables fighting not just criminals, but a tidal wave of rules, regulations and political interference.